The subsequent film adaptation, featuring Glenn Close and John Malkovich, was a critical and box office hit. Les Liaisons Dangereuses premiered in 1985, making stars of Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan. OVO puts its trademark twist on a theatrical classic with an intimate and fiercely physical production, featuring a live string quartet providing Bridgerton influenced musical accompaniment, and remixing the play’s themes of women and power for the #metoo generation. These consummate seducers wield sex as a means to power, apply battleground strategies to affairs of the human heart and play seduction as a competitive sport.īut when he falls in love for real, she realises she is playing a game with something and someone that she can't bear to lose.Īnd when they turn on each other, it’s win or die…Ģ00 years since the publication of Choderlos de Laclos’ scandalous novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses remains shocking, seductive and hilariously funny. "Dominic West proves superb and Janet McTeer makes a triumphant return to the West End in this revival of Christopher Hampton’s witty play.Two former lovers come together in pre-revolutionary France to corrupt the innocent and the virtuous for selfish kicks and fresh sexual conquests.
"This is a handsome period staging, in a crumbled chateau interior, opulent with candle-chandeliers, chaise-longues, even a harpiscord – dust-sheets supplying an eerie sense of a ghost-like reprise of long-dead deeds." The Broadway production of Donmar Warehouse's Les Liaisons Dangereuses is playing a limited engagement through Sunday, Januonly at the Booth. "Even if Josie Rourke’s revival cannot totally trump memories of the original 1985 production, or indeed the 1988 movie, it is still an evening to richly savour." This beautifully cast and designed evening is another feather in the Donmar's cap, and surely another candidate for a West End transfer. As the women he draws into his dark web, Mortydd Clark and Elaine Cassidy are superb, as is Edward Holcroft as the man she toys with. McTeer - her scrunched-up bosom providing a performance of its own with every breath she takes or exhales - and West are ideal sparring partners. Their 8th step - making a list of all the people they've harmed - would include most of the other characters in this play and I wonder how the 9th step would play out, when they have to make directs amends to those they've harmed.Īs spectator sport, it is grim but gripping to watch and in Josie Rourke's absolutely sumptuous production, frequently lit by candlelight, it variously glows and glowers. It's an ugly, uncomfortable life of dishonest feelings Valmont and Merteuil would, in modern times, be dubbed sex addicts, and I could happily recommend a 12-step programme for them to help them understand their damaging patterns of addictive sexual behaviour. Meanwhile, they wreck havoc with the emotional and sexual lives of others. In fact, as you watch it with an alternately intrigued and appalled fascination, you might be happy that you're not a member of this particular court, even as you congratulate yourself for being part of the court invited to watch it.īased on Laclos's epistolary 1782 novel, it portrays the sinister games of romance, sex and deceit being played out by former partners the Vicomte de Valmont (Dominic West) and the Marquis de Merteuil (Janet McTeer), who have never fully resolved their own relationship and meanwhile toy with others as a kind of entertainment for each other that also provides a kind of torture by jealousy for each other as well. It reveals a closed world of court aristocrats, none of whom appear to work, and therefore have too much time on their hands to simply behave badly towards each other.
Furthermore, its glorious new production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses will be broadcast live to over 600 UK cinemas on January 28 as part of NT Live.īut Christopher Hampton's play, first premiered in 1985 by the RSC before transferring to the West End and Broadway, is in many ways the perfect court play. With a seating capacity of just 251, it can't possibly get everyone in, but it has lately made attempts to open itself up to a wider audience - seats aren't all sold before the show even opens, but a nightly bank of front row tickets in the stalls and circle are held back for sale, at just £10, for every performance, put on sale just two weeks ahead of the week they're being sold for.
The Donmar Warehouse has sometimes been accused of being a "court theatre" - a theatre not for the masses, but for a cozy coterie of exclusive insiders who, as in the theatres at ancient European palaces,had exclusive access to them.
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